Feminisation of PR

I am very interested in why there are more female PR practitioners than men. I had read a 2007 PRWeek survey that revealed that 63% of PR practitioners* are women. This had me wondering, why aren’t there more men in PR? I even did a blog examining why PR is dominated by women. In reading Kevin Moloney’s book Rethinking Public Relations: The Spin and the Substance, he offers several suggestions to why women dominate PR. One of his theories was that women are better at communicating. This was brought up in class today when we were discussing “feminisation” traits. Several people in class associated women with being better communicators. It is debatable rather women are actually better at communicating due to biological or social traits. I would agree like most of my classmates that women are better at communicating and that is why they are enter into PR because ideally it's about creating a two-way communication between an organisation and the public.

Although women dominate the PR industry, they are still underpaid compared to males. In America there are gender discrimination laws that are aimed at preventing unequal pay and discrimination in the work force. However, in class it was stated that in a 2001 study, women in the U.S earn 46% less than men. As I read Moloney’s book he also discussed that women in PR are underpaid as well in the U.S and in the UK. If it is know that women are unpaid, why is nothing being done to fix this problem? It seems to me that since nothing is being done to correct this problem, it has become the norm that women will just be unpaid although they dominate the PR industry. When will equality in pay in PR exist? This seems to be a question that no one has a solution for or is trying to fix.

Reference:
*http://offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/misc/WRP/ReportsandSurveys/SalarySurvey2007-RESULTS.pdf